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Festival shows the promises and perils of open data

People enjoying the Open Knowledge Festival (Image&colon; Gregor Fischer)

Governments and big businesses want information to be free, but how will it work? A Berlin festival last week cast a friendly but critical eye over the idea

From science journals to research data, there is a movement towards setting data free for everyone to use. It is a fine idea, but how we get from A to Z is quite another issue.

This was the main theme of this year’s Open Knowledge Festival, which ran from 15 to 17 July at Berlin’s Kulturbrauerei cultural centre in Germany. Scientists, activists, NGOs, artists, law-makers and policy wonks all descended on the second festival hosted by Open Knowledge, a non-profit organisation that promotes the open availability and distribution of information.

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There have been many open data, activism and hacking conferences over the last few years, but the atmosphere of this one was electric. For once, people believed that they might actually succeed in changing the status quo.

Industry is clearly paying attention, with sponsorship from Google and the investment firm Omidyar Network, and a keynote speech from Eric Hysen, Google’s programme manager for elections and civic engagement.

Businesses are also looking at the commercial opportunities afforded by open data. Take, for example, Nostalgeo, which maps old photographs onto modern day sites to see how their locality has changed over the decades, or Parkopedia, which maps street parking from open data and went on to secure deals with Lexus, Audi and BMW.

Open path

Openness looks to be inexorable. Even Europe’s policy heavyweights seem to have caught the bug. Neelie Kroes, the vice-president of the European Commission who leads the EC’s Digital Agenda, was at the conference, meeting the movement’s movers and shakers face to face.

Where it affects the conduct and practice of science, the EC is cheering open data along. Over the course of the festival, people were asked what the EC should focus on to create a truly open scientific culture.

Creating an open culture (Image&colon; Gregor Fischer)

For a start, anyone bidding for EU funding would do well to arrange open-access publication of their research. Open-access, free, papers reach the public; they gain more citations than the equivalent paid-for articles.The assumption – or the hope, at any rate – is that such research findings are reused more within the scientific community.

But open-access journals are only the first step on the road to an open system for science – and the route map is far from clear.

At last month’s Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting – an annual gathering of laureates and young scientists – Nobel prize-winner Randy Schekman, founder of open-access journal eLife, insisted that researchers should be judged on the quality of their research, rather than the impact factor of the journal in which they publish or the reputation of their institution.

Critical spirit

Few would disagree with the sentiment, but were science to become truly open, how, and from whom, would researchers acquire their reputations? Would affiliation to an institution become more, or less, important? How would we assess publication in a traditional, high-impact journal, since, at present, it is hardly likely to be an open-source one?

The hunt is on for examples of best practice. Jenny Molloy, who coordinates Open Knowledge’s open science working group, recounted the work of Matthew Todd’s Open Source Malaria team at the University of Sydney, Australia, as anecdotal evidence of how open science can beat traditional science at solving problems. When they released all their datasets, Todd’s team found new collaborators and friendly interest from pharmaceutical companies – input they were unlikely to have received if they had followed traditional publication practices.

And recent research by geneticist Todd Vision and informatics researcher Heather Piwowar shows that publications accompanied by open datasets are cited more frequently, which is better for science and scientists. Molloy told New Scientist that she is now looking for more empirical data so she can evaluate how and when open science is more efficient than traditional science – something, she admits, that may depend on circumstances.

In the same critical spirit, The Engine Room, a network-based organisation exploring political, social and other non-academic uses of data, ran a session on when open data goes wrong. Unsurprisingly, the UK government’s care.data programme was cited as an example. Due to share information across the country’s health system, it has been put on hold twice now in the wake of PR blunders and public suspicion.

More than the inspiring atmosphere of the festival, more even than the presence of serious policy players and businesses, it was this sort of critical approach that turned what could have been dismissed as a congress of zealots into a rational and legitimate lobby for change.